Chrysler Pacifica recall follows months of engine stalls

Ongoing engine issues prompts recall with software fix in April

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) has issued a recall notice on their 2017 Pacifica minivans after months of mounting pressure from owners, the Center for Auto Safety in Washington D.C., and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). All non-hybrid Pacificas, model year 2017, are included in the recall, including 153,859 in the U.S. and 7,457 units in Canada. All the vehicles were made in Windsor, Ontario.

The recall says: “An investigation by FCA US has discovered that under a rare set of conditions, a vehicle’s engine control module (ECM) may incorrectly assess the engine’s operating status. If this occurs, the engine may stall.”

The recall notice also states that “[m]ost such events known to FCA US reportedly occurred at idle or while starting, turning, or driving at low, steady speeds. Further, most were singular events that occurred over thousands of miles of travel, and customers were able to restart their vehicles immediately afterward.”

The notice is right in pointing out the rarity and randomness of the stalling incidents, but it is that situation that has left some Pacifica owners at loose ends. Dealers have been unable to duplicate the problem, which also hasn’t come up on on-board diagnostic codes from the vehicles, and fixes up until this point consisted of best-guessing. But according to some owners, some of the stalling issues happened with low mileage on their vans, and in other cases the stall happens at highway speeds, which is even more dangerous considering that, when the engine fails, the driver loses all power steering and braking.

Adam Cohen, a Washington, D.C. attorney, was no longer driving his Pacifica when I spoke to him in late November, when at which point it had stalled twice while his wife was driving it. “A corporate case manager (with FCA) told me this was the first they’d heard of the problem,” he says. “Yet at this point, there were 40 cases of it documented on the NHTSA website.” It took months, but Cohen managed a buyback of his van, as did several other owners.

Cohen leads the petition filed by the Center for Auto Safety for the recall, though a class action lawsuit has been filed in California in January of this year that “includes all U.S. residents who purchased or leased 2017-2018 Chrysler Pacifica minivans equipped with 3.6-liter V6 engines and 9-speed 948TE automatic transmissions.” While the lawsuit alleges FCA has “no idea” how to fix the problem, most owners are awaiting the proposed fix, promised to be here by April.

According to Cohen, “As we highlighted in our petition, there were owners who experienced the failure six times in the first 2,000 miles and others who did not experience it until after driving 11,000 miles.”

Sid Patel is a physician in Menlo Park, California. As he told the New York Times in November, his new vehicle shut off at 70 mph near San Francisco. “I had no electrical power, no power steering.” As the minivan slowed to a crawl and other cars whizzed by, he edged over to get to the shoulder on the right. A semi truck was coming, and the driver laid on the horn and swerved out and it “barely missed me.”

Erica Gentner owns a Pacifica Touring she and her husband bought in September, 2016; it stalled in a parking lot when they’d had it three months, then it stalled again and she starting contacting Chrysler, but got nowhere. She lives in San Diego with three kids under 5; a trip to her parents in Ohio turned into a nightmare, with the van ending up with a dealer there for three weeks as they found nothing – the same as on every other van associated with this petition.

Another stall, another dealer, and Gentner’s husband burning all his leave time from the military as Erica fought for loaner vehicles to get around for the weeks at a time that dealerships found nothing wrong. In the office of one of those dealers, a spokesman for Chrysler Corporate hung up on her, saying “What do you want us to do?”

“The fifth time [it stalled] was on the Pennsylvania turnpike,” she says. “We somehow got it off the roadway and into a construction zone, and had it towed to yet another dealer.” After another all-clear, it stalled twice within a mile of the dealer. They finally replaced a camshaft sensor and shipped the van back to San Diego. Erica is scared to drive her kids in it.

The recall by FCA is a welcome one, but while it includes all non-hybrid 2017 Pacificas, there are several reported cases with NHTSA of 2018 models doing the same thing.

George Iny, president of the Automobile Protection Association (APA) in Canada, notes there have been two reported incidents to Transport Canada thus far, and that “Canadians benefit from the more robust environment in the U.S. around vehicle safety. In situations like this, vehicle and regulatory harmonization worked in our favour.” When contacted, FCA Canada sent over the same news of the Pacifica recall that we received from FCA in America.

Canada needs to develop a tougher independent stance on any manufacturer that drags its feet on safety issues. Jason Levine at the Center for Auto Safety is a little more pointed: “As for the Pacifica – probably the best thing to be said is that the recall was a result of a petition from the Center for Auto Safety to NHTSA in late November – which was a result of Chrysler customers not receiving satisfaction when they brought stalling, brand new, minivans into the dealer.”

If you own one of these vehicles, you need this recall performed whether you’ve had issues or not.